Notes on Mastery
The question is simple.
Who are you?
What is your purpose?
Prerequisite for mastery:
1. Give up all your preconceived ideas, notions, belief system. Start from point Zero.
2. Mastery is not about how you feel. Feelings don’t matter. There are enough courses and seminars out there to help you feel things, your past, or whatever. You cannot use feelings to measure your understanding of mastery.
3. Thus, journey has nothing to do with: your past, your issues, your belief system, your fear, or your guilt. Issues have nothing to do with mastery. You don’t need repair or breakthroughs.
4. Mastery is not about solutions and fixes. It is not about solving things.
It is not a place to get, it is not about getting someplace.
It is the process of all times .
What it is about is:
Discovery
Mastery is exploration, unveiling, creating, and questions.
Rigor is essential in mastery and is not to be taken casually. Be diligent, hungry and disciplined.
If you are bored, you are being boring.
Mastery is the ability of distinction.
What we know comes from the eyes to our perception, then to our judgment and finally to our interpretation.
Mastery is letting go of what you already know.
Mastery is like the first time; it is the first time all the time.
What makes up our experiences? Physical sensation, Mental (how we think),
Emotion (how we feel).
The mind is a mechanism that is not designed to work right now. It is a thing that is designed by default to protect us from what might happen to us in the future based on what has happened to us in the past.
Mastery is to love the plateau.
The self is a separate identity apart from Mind, Emotions and Body.
Mastery is not a solo journey.
Steps to Mastery:
1. Experience your experience. Be present with what happens right now – be aware of it, notice what occurs, show up in it, while it is now.
2. Communicate experiences to help others.
The “I” is no longer confined to mind, feelings and body.
What are you experiencing now?
I am experiencing a sense of control, a feeling bigger than the “I” that I’m used to. I have a strong sensation in my body. I think I am having a hard time pulling out of my perceived “concepts” box. Oh God, I have a concept for everything. I am not my mind. I am not my body. I am not my feeling.
Listening is simply hearing with attention.
I must learn to listen with the self, not the mind or the body or the feelings.
Everything happens in my language. The mind is everything
Self is a place to notice from.
Notice how you appear to others.
Oh yeah and there is reality. Mind is the creator of the reality.
When questions are asked, ask yourself: What is the purpose of the question, and who is asking it.
Mastery is getting to where you are coming from.
A Road to Mastery
Start with something simple. Try touching your forehead with your hand. Ah, that’s easy, automatic. Nothing to it. But there was a time when you were as far removed from the mastery of that simple skill as a non-pianist is from playing a Beethoven sonata.
First, you had to learn to control the movements of your hands (you were just a baby then) and somehow get them to move where you wanted them to. You had to develop some sort of kinesthetic “image” of your body so that you could know the relationship between your forehead and other parts of your body. You had to learn to match this image with the visual image of an adult’s body. You had to learn how to mimic your mother’s actions. Momentous stuff, make no mistake about it.
And we haven’t yet considered the matter of language—learning to decode sounds shaped as words and to match them to our own actions.Only after all this could you play the learning game that parents everywhere play with their children: “Where’s your nose? Where are your ears? Where’s your forehead?” As with all significant learning, this learning was measured not in a straight line but in stages: brief spurts of progress separated by periods during which you seemed to be getting nowhere.
Still, you learned an essential skill. What’s more important, you learned about learning.
You started with something difficult and made it easy and pleasurable through instruction and practice. You took a master’s journey. And if you could learn to touch your forehead, you can learn to play a Beethoven sonata or fly a jet plane, to be a better manager, do martial arts and get your Black Belt or improve your relationships.
Our current society works in many ways to lead us astray, but the path of mastery is always there, waiting for us.
By: George Leonard
“Mastery”